Abstract

The study, the first of its kind in the Maltese Islands, reviewed crime in a spatio-temporal aspectbased on where offenders live, interact and commit crime. The study has sought to develop anunderstanding of the Maltese Islands’ crime within a social and landuse structure through theemployment of high-end GIS tools.A study at European and Small Islands level resulted in a relative safety-danger dynamic scoremodel that shows that Malta is safe, though progressively decreasing in relative safety. A 40-yearanalysis depicted increasing crime rates as well as changes in crime categories. Findingshighlight a high foreign prisoner component, highly-specific local-offender social situations withresidential and poverty clustering. The findings show that the Maltese offender is male, young, arecidivist, increasingly less literate, has had a secondary education, single, unemployed andincreasingly partaking to serious crimes.Residential analysis show a preference for the harbour region where offenders live in areascharacterised by poverty that have disproportionate offender concentrations when compared totheir shrinking population concentration. Offences committed by convicted offenders fall withinhigh dwelling concentrations, vacant dwelling concentrations, apartment zones and lowpopulation density areas. Offender-offence findings show that Maltese offenders commit crimeclose to their residence mostly travelling less than 5 km.Reported offence analysis results in high summer rates, with specific weekend to weekdaydifferences, concentrated in a relatively small area within the conurbation with unique hotspotsin fringe recreational localities. An analysis of landuse categories identified that residential areashost the highest offence counts, particularly serious crimes, whilst retail-related crime activitiesdirectly effect neighbourhoods through distance travelled from the retail entity.Outputs from the research include a conceptual model based on the crime, social and landuseconstructs, a league-table of crime-mapping sites and the creation of a web-enabled Crimemapsystem for the Maltese Islands.